Inventing Africa

History, Archaeology and Ideas

By Robin Derricourt

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2011 Robin Derricourt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7453-3105-8

Contents

Preface: The construction of African pasts,
1. The changing shape and perception of ‘Africa’,
2. Mythic and mystic Africa,
3. Looking both ways: the enigma of Raymond Dart,
4. Egos and fossils,
5. Stirring the gene pool: human ancestors from Africa to the wider world,
6. Ancient Egypt and African sources of civilisation,
7. Old states good, new states bad,
8. The present of the past,
Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

The changing shape and perception of ‘Africa’

There is no single Africa, with consistent boundaries through time. Africa has been perceived with different geographical limits, a different concept, both by past and recent societies. As the Kenyan writer and scholar Ali Mazrui noted, ‘It took European conceptualisation and cartography to turn Africa into a continent.’ And settlement of Africa by humans has not always occupied the whole area we describe today.

Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism showed how western culture brought together varied cultures and societies and then selectively attributed certain characteristics to this imagined oriental world. Studies have appeared of certain aspects of ‘Africanisms’ – images of Africa created in literature and philosophy, in history or in museums of art and ethnography. The cases we review here are concerned primarily with constructions of the African past including the deep past.

Often the term Africa, or its equivalent in earlier societies, has been restricted to describe a ‘them’, the other, outside of ‘our’ world. Throughout history terms have been used both by outsiders and by peoples settled in Africa itself to group together vast and diverse areas of the African continent (adding, selectively, specific offshore islands). The boundaries of Africa, when seen as ‘the other’, have been fluid from the earliest literary contexts of ancient Egypt into modern times. Depending on context, everyone draws a different boundary around the Africa of their own choosing.

Today most people, when they refer to ‘Africa’, think they know the area to which they are referring, yet these may be quite varied. The boundaries of ‘Africa’ are fluid with different uses, a fact that is of particular importance in dialogues about African society or identity, African development or underdevelopment, political relations with Africa, African literature or culture. Politicians, journalists and scholars alike sometimes apply the term ‘African’ to mean the area to the south of the countries that border the Mediterranean, which are considered part of the Middle East; Africa as shorthand for sub-Saharan Africa. But this tendency to separate a supposed real, black, African sub-Saharan Africa from a northern, less black, more Mediterranean or Middle Eastern Africa is contrary not only to political realities past and present, but also to genetics.

The definition of Africa has been flexible in modern times, not just by the inclusion of Atlantic and Indian Ocean islands in different political definitions. European and American scholars and their institutions have recognised separate fields of ‘Middle Eastern Studies’ and ‘African Studies’. The first frequently includes all the Arabic-speaking countries of Africa’s Mediterranean littoral, with occasional extensions further south. ‘African Studies’ is often, if inconsistently, defined more narrowly as sub-Saharan Africa. While a wish to be inclusive may allow associations to broaden their geographical coverage, formal structures of research funding may be narrower.

A special example of classificatory ambiguity comes from South Africa. Through most of the twentieth century the dominant white cultures of South Africa, in different contexts, could see ‘Africa’ as the area to the north, the countries in which black culture dominated. Thus ‘African literature’ or ‘African art’ were clearly different from, and exclusive of, the creative production of white South Africans. But by extension, the terms were sometime applied to include the work of the black (but usually not the coloured) community in South Africa.

The continent’s land boundary with Western Asia has been a flexible one, and less significant than internal environmental boundaries. Politically Sinai belongs today with Egypt, an African country, though for 15 years from 1967 to 1982 it was part of Israel, an Asian country. In the distant past Sinai represented a border zone, not a border, between continental land masses. The water boundary that today separates Africa from Asia dates, of course, only from the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869. The great scholar of contemporary Africa, Ali Mazrui, has suggested that on cultural and historical grounds the Arabian peninsula could more logically be classed as part of Africa than as part of Asia.

The term ‘Africa’ as a modern political division of the world is today most commonly applied to the land mass from Cape Town to one side or other of Sinai, together with a number of islands large and small in the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean (including a dozen island states or island possessions of European states). So geographically, some islands around Africa have long been part of the African cultural zone; others like Madagascar as much part of the Asian (or Indian Ocean) cultural zone, while some Atlantic islands can be considered effectively part of Europe. Mediterranean islands, equidistant between the European and African land masses, are usually seen as part of the European continent from which much of their cultural heritage derives.

CHANGING SPACE OF HUMAN SETTLEMENT

The long sweep of prehistory and history has seen changes to the areas of land and maritime Africa occupied by humans and their hominin ancestors.

The story of their settlement in Africa is one of gradual expansion, from origins in the open grassland areas of eastern and southern Africa, then a spread into and across the arid regions of northern Africa during their less harsh periods. The last area of the African mainland to see human settlement was the equatorial rainforest, ironically the environment most suited to humankind’s closest living great ape relatives. And movement to settle Africa’s offshore islands was late, sometimes very late.

The early Australopithecus hominins were restricted to the grasslands and relatively open woodlands of southern and eastern Africa. The boundaries created by the arid deserts to the north and south-west, and the dense equatorial forests of western Africa, delineate the area they could occupy, but the paucity of fossil remains make it difficult to map the specific limits of their territory.

Around 2.5 million years ago there was a global shift from warm and wet to cool and dry climates. The grasslands and open woodlands spread at the expense of dense forests, and the hominin species diversified, specialising to suit different environments, and including the first member of our Homo genus, Homo habilis, by 2 million years ago. This species developed the first stone tools, allowing greater control over economic resources. Stone tools have greater survival than bones in the archaeological record so we can be confident that this species remained limited in settlement area bounded by forest, desert and maritime boundaries.

The successor Homo erectus emerged between 2.0 and 1.7 million years ago. It seemed better adapted to heat and was able to expand both into the increased areas of African grasslands and into more arid open environments. Hunter-gatherer bands probably covered larger territories and were able to follow prey over longer distances. The development of Acheulian hand-axe technology allows archaeology to plot their distribution in what can seem almost continuous land use in the regions of settlement. This was the species that passed through arid North Africa to cross Sinai into Eurasia. Indeed the boundaries of Africa and Eurasia seem less important than between the occupied grassland and the most arid zones.

The expansion of the Acheulian hand-axe makers into much of Africa was limited by the dense tropical forest region of equatorial Africa, the last continental ecological zone to resist human settlement. To a foraging economy, ease of acquiring food is least difficult in temperate grassland, more challenging in tropical savannah, next in the desert regions, and most difficult in any of the forest zones. However, there was settlement in the equatorial region by modern humans around 40,000 years ago, with appropriately specialised stone tool kits.

The desert areas of northern and north-eastern Africa experienced significant fluctuations in climate from 115,000 years ago, which marks the start of the last glacial period of earth’s history. In the periods of greater rainfall the desert shrank, and many parts of today’s deserts were occupied by hunter-gatherer communities. The long-established land link of Sinai is such that in later prehistory, North Africa and the southern Levant could be considered a single geographical area. But periods of extreme aridity expanded the deserts and made them unsuitable for human occupation. We see a cycle of human occupation in the areas of today’s arid regions, with absorption of hunter-gather communities in their wetter periods, and the expulsion of these communities into and through the Levant and Arabia as the rainfall reduced and the desert zones expanded again.

Until human groups had learnt to construct water craft, migration routes out of the African continent were limited to the narrow strip linking to the Sinai peninsula. At current sea levels this strip was some 145km from north to south, of which only some 70km are currently dry land. The first movement ‘out of Africa’ was across this land boundary at around 1.8 million years ago. While some scientists have pointed to the proximity of the African land mass to Arabia (at the Bab el-Mandab) and Europe (at Gibraltar, and even Sicily), these were impenetrable water boundaries until the spread of our own species.

After the emergence of modern humans around 200,000 years ago came developments in cognition and human social behaviour. But it was probably not until around 60,000 years ago that water-borne technology (and the social structures and pressures that underlay it) allowed a sustainable human population to cross the Bab el-Mandab strait across the Red Sea into Arabia and thence into Asia and again by water to reach Australia.

COASTAL ISLANDS

The archaeology of Africa’s diverse coastal islands is patchy, but suggests that movement to settle the islands off the shore of the African continent was relatively late in the sequence of human settlement.

Evidence for earlier water crossings in the Mediterranean is very limited, and relates mainly to the Greek islands of the Ionian Sea. The settlement of most Mediterranean islands postdated the introduction of agriculture. However, in 2010 evidence was announced for Palaeolithic material in south-west Crete dated before 130,000 years ago; if accepted, this would be the earliest clear evidence for human water crossings.

The more distant islands of the Atlantic were uninhabited at Spanish or Portuguese contact in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Madeira may have been sighted by sixth-century BC Carthaginian and first-century AD Roman vessels blown off course). Only the Canary Islands, 100km west of Morocco, show early settlement – occupied by migrants from North Africa by at least 500 BC.

Much more important is Bioko (Fernando Po), 32km west of Cameroon, and part of Equatorial Guinea. It is thought to have had occupation from West Africa by the first millennium BC and possibly as early as 10,000 years ago.

The Red Sea between Egypt and Arabia has been an active maritime zone for trade since pre-pharaonic Egypt, though settlements on Egypt’s Red Sea coast remained sparse. Trade was established across the Red Sea by 5,000 BC, with trade routes along the coastal strip linking to the cross-desert routes to the Nile Valley.

African farming communities were exploiting the coastal resources of East Africa by boat, with at least occasional visits to the offshore islands, in the early first millennium AD, and the area was on maritime trade routes from at least this time, with sparse trade goods corroborating pre-Islamic written sources. The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea from ca. AD 40 records the sewn as well as the dugout boats used by African communities in Rhapta. There is increasing evidence for their involvement in the coastal trade of the Greco-Roman period, which can be dated to at least 100 BC.

Recent research has led to suggestions of much earlier human settlement in Zanzibar, 60km from the mainland, with cattle teeth in the fourth millennium BC and possible large stone tools suggesting human presence some 20,000 years ago. The significance of these proposals awaits further investigation and debate.

Most Indian Ocean islands had first human contact not from Africa but from the seagoers of the Islamic world, with the Comoros settled from the eighth century AD. Madagascar was settled by at least 700 AD, and probably from the sixth century, with the Indian Ocean seafarers from east and north linking it to the African coast. These links helped to bring African influences and populations into the island.

The South African Indian Ocean coast has few islands; Robben Island and Dassen Island, off South Africa, were uninhabited when visited by the Portuguese and Dutch in the fifteenth century and sixteenth centuries.

The classification of Africa’s offshore islands with the continent has therefore been changing and cumulative throughout history.

ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PERCEPTIONS OF THE OTHER AFRICA

The first literate society on the African mainland was that of the Nile Valley. Through 3,000 years of pharaonic civilisation, ancient Egypt interacted with neighbours in south-west Asia, in the desert lands to the west, further south up the Nile, and more patchily with the lands to the south-east. Ethnicity was a primary identifier, with names and images of other peoples appearing in public inscriptions.

Ancient Egyptian records used clear and continuing terms for other peoples and other areas. Today’s Egyptologists, looking down at a world map, have tended to seek to put external boundaries around these: an approach that may apply to powerful states bordering other powerful states, but has less reality when applied to diffuse communities whose interest to Egypt lay in their closest border of interaction.

To pharaonic Egypt their land was central to the world – the Red and the Black, combining the Nile Delta with the Nile Valley, and commanding both the Eastern Desert (to the Red Sea) and the oases and limited settled areas of the Western Desert. Egyptian geography recognised and distinguished the peoples and states of south-west Asia with whom they traded, and periodically had military conflicts or alliances.

Within the African continent Egyptian civilisation stood unique and undefeated by other states, though its own royal house was at times subject to military success of outsiders. The perspective was therefore of ‘us’, the Egyptians, with the other groups spread outwards from the Egyptian heartland. The terminology for the others has a fair degree of consistency through the pharaonic period, and is recognised not just in ethnic names (and the areas implied by these) but in artistic representation, with characteristics of physique and manner of dress. These may be stylised means of representation, not necessarily reflecting dress forms contemporary with each representation. There is no recognition in Egyptian tradition of an African continent separated from South-east Asia by Sinai and the Red Sea, nor is there a single term for those others who occupied the lands west and south of the Egyptian Nile Valley. Thus these groups have a boundary with Egypt, but not necessarily a boundary beyond.

To the west of Egypt are the groups usually translated as the Libyans, but described (in later times interchangeably) as Tjehenu and Tjemehu. These seem generic names for all those peoples living beyond the western boundary of the Egyptian polity. New ethnic names were added in the New Kingdom, with Libyan groups from further west described as Libu (from which the Greeks derived their term Libya) and Meshwesh. These are mainly nomadic people, coming out of the western (‘Libyan’) desert, mainly to trade but at times to raid, with conflicts enough for Pharaonic inscriptions boasting of Egypt’s military success against the Libyans. Rulers of Libyan origin were the pharaohs in the 22nd and 23rd dynasties (ca. 945–715 BC). Gradually the generalised sparse populations grouped as ‘them’, Libyans spreading thinly west, had come to rule ‘us’.

To the south of Egypt areas in the Nile Valley were known as Ta Nehesy (Lower Nubia), and further south as Kush, in middle Nubia. Beyond lay the area called Irem in the New Kingdom. These locations reflected the Egyptian concept of land and settlement as Nilotic: these were the people whose land bounded the Nile and extended sufficiently into the riverine hinterland as economic necessity required.

The name Punt occurs often in Egyptian writing, but the area to which it refers is unclear. It could be reached by boats south along the Red Sea and was a source for exotic products including myrrh, ebony wood and African savannah animals. This has led most scholars to locate it in the Horn of Africa, either Somalia or further north in the coast from Port Sudan to Eritrea. There is an alternative strong argument to locate it in southern Arabia since elsewhere it is said to be accessible via Sinai, with Arabians acting as intermediaries for trading African products. Both interpretations take the modern geographer’s idea of space, looking down at the map instead of outwards. From Egypt’s point of view, far-distant trading locations down the Red Sea might have been called Punt irrespective of which side of the sea – African or Arabian – they lay, and the generic use of the name Punt in many contexts would allow it to be a blurring of the continental divide. Punt is seen as a land neither to be feared (as another state) nor despised (as primitive nomads), a vagueness that again supports the lack of firm location. The name is not known in non-Egyptian written sources. Punt exists ‘in a void’. It remains possible that Egypt used this name for the non-threatening world that extended probably both sides of the Red Sea, including an undefined extent of Africa that lay south-east of the more readily mastered upper Nile Valley.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Inventing Africa by Robin Derricourt. Copyright © 2011 Robin Derricourt. Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
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